Election season is officially over, with the counts for last weekend’s local council elections coming to a close on Friday night.

Both parties are publicly negotiating the tricky task of either making a victory feel less like a defeat or disguising a defeat as a victory, but privately they will no doubt spend the next weeks gleaning whatever lessons they can from the election results.

To help them along, here are four key takeaways that emerge in the immediate aftermath of the count.

1. Labour’s worst fears didn’t materialise, but the MEP election result wasn’t a blip

Labour’s losses continued into the local council election, but perhaps not to the extent that Labour insiders expected, with some bracing themselves for the party’s first local council defeat in two decades.

Party supporters will be inclined to look on the bright side – Labour ultimately won the local council elections fairly comfortably, with over 52% of the total vote, holding on to an absolute majority of voters, unlike in the EP elections, where only 45% of voters supported the party.

It also took home 252 seats, over 40 more than PN, and retained control of 39 local councils, well over half of Malta’s 68 localities.

And, after all, any party would have been hard-pressed to repeat the triumph of 2019, making a decline in votes inevitable.

But the party would do well to look at what went wrong and address the several red flags on the horizon.

Labour’s 52% share may be a majority, but it’s also a sharp drop of almost six percentage points since 2019. The party won almost 16,000 fewer votes than it did five years ago. And what was once an 18 percentage point gap between the two main parties is now down in single digits, at just under 8%.

Even more damningly, Labour lost votes in almost every single town in Malta and Gozo, losing virtually every locality that had been balanced on a knife’s edge. It lost its majority in Mellieħa, lost Msida, San Ġwann and Siġġiewi, three of the towns it had nabbed in 2019, and lost the key battleground of Mosta.

Even in the localities it won, its majorities have been slashed, and in some it now leads by the most threadbare of margins. Pembroke, for instance, remained Labour-led by just seven votes.

In total, the party lost 15 seats across the islands, shrinking its previous 79-seat majority almost by half.

Just as worrying for Labour is that the party lost almost as much in its heartlands as it did in battleground towns. It dropped 14 percentage points in Marsascala and Santa Luċija, six in Żurrieq, and seven in Qrendi, amongst others.

In Qala, the party lost a massive 18 percentage points, despite Abela having made its former mayor Clint Camilleri Gozo Minister.

Although Labour strategists may have been expecting some middle-of-the-road voters to move away from the party after a decade, they will be asking themselves why their core voters are also beginning to look elsewhere.

There’s no two ways about it, Labour won both the MEP and local council elections. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a more pyrrhic victory in Malta’s recent electoral history.

2. PN makes inroads, but remains a distant second

The scenes of PN delegates’ celebrations at the Naxxar counting hall was all the evidence you need that the results are better than anything the party could have hoped for a fortnight ago.

The party ate heavily into Labour’s lead across the islands and will enter the next legislature wielding far more authority over Malta and Gozo’s local councils than it previously did.

It scored important victories in several key towns, including Mosta, St Paul’s Bay, San Ġwann and Msida, some with impressive swings, to bring its overall tally up to 24 councils.

Just as importantly, PN won 20 more seats than it did in 2019, narrowing the gap in seats between the parties from almost 80 to a more respectable 44.

It also held on to its councils, with the sole exception of Għasri, which slipped out of its fingers to come under Labour’s control.

The big picture also looks rosier for PN than it might have expected. The party more than halved Labour’s lead, slashing it down from being over 47,000 votes ahead in 2019 to just over 20,000 now, gaining a healthy four percentage points in its share of the total vote.

PN  registered gains in the vast majority of towns, with only a handful of relatively painless mishaps (a 14 percentage point drop in Kerċem, smaller drops in Balzan and Gżira).

But while it's good news, the turnaround is in line with what the party was projecting - it hit its target of overturning five majorities by flipping Msida, San Ġwann, Mosta, St Paul's Bay and Siġġiewi -and was not the huge swing it celebrated during the MEP race.

Apart from swinging five localities, it also helped to cancel out Labour’s majority in another five towns that will have hung councils.

PN will also be puzzled by its performance in Valletta. The widely reported woes brought about by the city’s gentrification did little to deter residents from reinstating a Labour council, with independent candidates eating into PN’s share of the vote, dropping it by over 7%.

Ultimately, PN still has a long way to go to bridge what substantially remains a chasm between the two parties.

Given that the party found itself within the touching distance of just 8,500 votes in the EP elections, much to its own surprise, party insiders may secretly be feeling slightly disappointed that the gap in local council votes is still above the 20,000 mark.

But what matters to PN, more than whether it won seats in one council or another, is that this week’s results mean that the party can approach the next elections believing that it stands a fighting chance, for the first time in years.

For a party that spent much of the past decade in the wilderness, that alone feels like a significant victory.

3. Hung councils could be here to stay

A glance at Malta’s new electoral map quickly reveals a novelty – while 2019’s election saw just two hung councils, both in Gozo, this time around, independent or small-party candidates will be tipping the balance of power in some major Maltese towns.

Birkirkara, one of the most highly populated towns in the country, will see independent candidate Kaylocke Buhagiar as kingmaker, sitting squarely between PL and PN’s six seats apiece. A former PL councillor, Buhagiar had little difficulty getting elected, winning a seat on the first count.

Mellieħa’s Matthew Borg Cuschieri will be in a similar position, taking one of the council’s nine seats, while the two major parties split the remaining four.

Another independent candidate in Floriana, Nigel Holland, came just a single vote short of being elected on the first count, easily winning a seat once inherited votes were counted. A former independent mayor of the town, Holland will be joined on the council by two PN and Pl councillors apiece, one of whom is former national team goalkeeper Justin Haber.

Former independent mayor of Floriana Nigel Holland will once again sit on the council. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

In Għarb it won’t be an independent candidate spoiling the major parties’ fun, but resident group Għarb l-Ewwel, who elected two of its candidates, David Apap and Lisa Marie Brooke, to join PL’s two councillors and PN’s sole elected representative.

And in Żebbuġ it will be a family affair, with Steve Zammit Lupi and his mother Elizabeth both winning seats, to join PL’s four councillors and PN’s three. Already a popular councillor throughout the last legislature, Steve Zammit Lupi breezed his way to election, winning three times as many first-count votes as the nearest contender.

Steve Zammit Lupi and his mother, Elizabeth, celebrate their election on Wednesday. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

More broadly, the positive signs for independent and third-party candidates in the European elections continued into the local elections.

Candidates from small parties and those standing as independents upped their vote tally by some 3,600 votes, reaching just over the 9.300 mark. Just as significantly, they almost tripled their number of seats, going from four in 2019 to 11. And whereas they usually hover between the 1% and 2% mark, this election saw them bump their share of the vote up to 3.6%.

No doubt, some of this is down to independent candidates like the aforementioned Kaylocke Buhagiar and former Gżira mayor (and MEP candidate) Conrad Borg Manché, both of whom defected from PL to stand as independents.

But their performance, and that of many others (including ADPD leader Sandra Gauci who won a seat in St Paul’s Bay, Malta’s largest council, and ADPD secretary general Ralph Cassar, elected in Attard) will be heartening for individuals keen on standing on their own steam come next election.

4. Voter turnout is lower than ever

The race to the top between the two parties overshadowed the small fact that voter turnout dipped under 60% for the first time in Malta’s recent electoral history, settling at 59.6%, or 272,000 votes.

Roughly the same number of people voted in 2019’s local council elections but, given Malta’s population growth over the past five years, the turnout back then was slightly higher, at 62.6%.

While turnout in local elections is typically lower than in either general or European elections, 2019 was the first time that local council elections were held simultaneously nationwide, making it difficult to compare turnout across prior elections.

What’s certain is that the last time voter turnout was this low in an election held nationwide, Malta was a very different place.

Emerging from the ashes of World War II, 25,000 people, or 42% of registered voters, turned up to vote in Malta’s 1945 general elections, electing Pawlu Boffa’s Labour Party – the only party on the ballot sheet - to nine of parliament’s 10 seats. The tenth seat went to an independent candidate, Henry Jones.

What last weekend's poor turnout means over the longer term remains to be seen. But with outgoing mayors and councillors complaining that councils have been stripped of their powers and reduced to the role of a village policemen, government would do well to consider whether it’s time to devolve more powers to local councils and reimagine their functions, in a bid to reignite the public’s enthusiasm for local politics.

Still, Maltese continue to be far more keen to cast their vote than the average European. EU-wide turnout in this year's MEP elections averaged just 51% - a figure that was celebrated in Europe but which would be considered abysmal within a local context.